Sir Thomas Sackville, Baron Buckhurst, Member of her Majesty's Privy Council,
Lord Lieutenant of Sussex, Exchequer to her Majesty the Queen and Commissioner
over state trials. Born 1535/6. Second
of three children of Richard "Fill Sack" Sackville, Chancellor of the Exchequer
and Winifred Brydges, dau.
of Sir John Brydges, Mayor of London. Educated Sullington (Lullington?) g.s.; Hart? Hall,
Oxford; Jesus?, Cambridge; Inner Temple, admitted 1 Jul 1555, called; Cambridge,
MA 1571; Oxford incorp. 1592. Married 1555, Cecily, daughter of Sir Thomas Baker
of London and Sissinghurst, Kent, and had 4 sons, including Robert,
and 3 daughters; 1 son illegitimate.

His elder sister Anne (who he would in later years argue extensively with
regarding the ownership of Sir Thomas More's estate Beaufort which she did
inherit from her mother, then Marchioness of Winchester, and Thomas
had led average lives for children of their era and station and had also
survived the third sibling a second daughter who passed on at an early age.

His education went as planned as his father would say, where upon at the age
of fifteen; he was had been educated out of Hart Hall, in Oxford. Two years
later in 1553 at the age of seventeen; he left his childhood home and took
residence in London where he began pursuing his life as a poet and playwright.

He
received the bulk his wealth from his father Sir Richard Sackville a wealthy
landowner whose acquisitiveness earned him the nickname of 'Fill Sack' and was
noted for reasons of his great wealth and vast patrimony. He
continue to live in such a manner as his father did, knowing how to spend his
moneys well and in such a way that he and his family could live in a comfortable
fashion.

At nineteen years of age in 1555, he met, fell in love with and married
the daughter of a member of the Privy Council under Queen Mary, Cicely Baker of
Kent. His father's exclusion from office under Mary did not significantly delay
Thomas Sackville's entry upon public life for
it was not long after his coming of age that he sat in his first Parliament. His
election at the beginning of 1558 for East
Grinstead, where his father had wielded great influence, had the appearance of a
safeguard against his failing to carry off the knighthood for Westmoreland;
after he had done so and entered the House as junior knight for that shire, the vacancy
at East Grinstead was filled by another Sackville nominee, Thomas Farnham. The
circumstances of Sackville's election for Westmoreland are not made easier of
explanation by the damaged state of the return, on which the surname is represented
only by the fragment 'sa...' A century ago the name was read as 'salkeld'. The
accuracy of this reading is borne out by the appearance of that name, afterwards
erased and replaced by 'sackvell', on one of the two remaining copies of the Crown
Office list; the other and later copy has 'sackveld' alone. It is thus possible
that a Thomas Salkeld, presumably of the prominent Westmoreland family of that
name, was elected but was afterwards superseded by Sackville. What is more likely,
however, is that Sackville was elected and that instead of his unfamiliar name
its near counterpart was entered on the return, to be copied on the Crown Office
list and only corrected when Sackville appeared in the House. Who procured his
election is a matter of speculation. Neither he nor his fellow-knight Anthony Kempe, another Sussex man, had any standing in Westmoreland, but both could
claim a marriage connection with Henry
Clifford, 2º Earl of Cumberland,
hereditary sheriff
of the county, and with his father-in-law the 3rd Lord Dacre of Gillesland;
Cumberland must also have had dealings with both Sackville's father, and
ex-chancellor or augmentations, and his father-in-law Sir John Baker, one of
whom doubtless made
the approach. For Sackville, as for Kempe, a knighthood of the shire was not to
recur; he was to sit as a burgess in the first two Elizabethan Parliaments and
in the third he took his seat in the Lords.

Sackville had appeared on the pardon roll in Oct 1553 as of London. On 8
Mar 1557, together with Thomas Swynton, he purchased various properties in Kent
and Sussex for £1,221. In co-operation with Thomas Norton he wrote "The Tragedie
of Gorboduc" but he handed over his other literary project "A myrroure for
magistrates" to George Ferrers and William Baldwin after completing the 'Introduction'.

In addition during the year of 1561 he
received the title of "Grandmaster of the Order of Freemasons". In 1563 he was
once again elected to Parliament this time for Aylesbury. When he became thirty
one years of age, he was knighted and raised to peerage as Lord Buckhurst which
did take place on the eighth day of Jun of that year. One year prior to
receiving the title of Lord Buckhurst; Queen Elizabeth awarded a piece of
property to keeping known as Knole.

Much of the fabric of Knole dates from the second half of the fifteenth
century. On 30 Jun 1456 William Fiennes sold the estate £266 13s 4d to Thomas
Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury (and for a brief period in 1455-6, Lord
Chancellor of England). Between that date and his death in 1486, Bourchier built
himself a substantial but relatively austere palace grouped around a series of
courtyards, and containing all of the elements that one would expect to see in
the house of an important medieval prelate - a great hall with a day parlour and
first-floor solar at one end and kitchens and domestic offices at the other, a
chapel, and lodgings for his large household.

When Bourchier died - at Knole - he left the estate to the See of
Canterbury, and it functioned as an archiepiscopal palace until 1538, when Henry
VIII bullied Thomas Cranmer into presenting it to the Crown. The
King
considerably enlarged the house by building three new ranges of lodgings and a
turreted and crenellated gatehouse in the front of the Archbishop's original
gatehouse, thus forming what is now known as the Green Court, the main entrance
court at Knole. After his death, the house went through a rather confused series
of occupancies. Edward VI assigned it to
John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland,
who for some reason returned it two years later. Mary he granted it to Cardinal
Pole for life in 1556; when he died in Nov 1558 (on the same day as the
Queen)
it reverted to the Crown. Elizabeth granted it to
John Dudley's son,
Robert,
Earl of Leicester, who promptly sublet it, before returning it, still sublet in
1566. In Jun 1566 the Queen presented the estate to his keeping, under whom
Knole has finally settled down to a more stable period of ownership. But throughout his career as one of her
Majesty’s chief advisers, he had been unable to even live at Knole, in
the stead he had managed replace the old Archbishop's palace with a Theobalds
or a Holdenby for his Queen's entertainment. Although he had been granted the
house and estate in 1566, it currently occupied by the Lennard family, tenants
who had moved in as the Earl of Leicester handed the property back to the Crown.

In 1568 he had been commissioned to traveled to France on an official visit,
his mission was to persuaded the Queen Mother to make a motion for the
marriage of Elizabeth with her second son, the
Duke of Anjou. In 1569 at
the age of thirty-three years old, he was honoured to be placed in the office of
Lord Lieutenant of Sussex. Two years later in 1571, he returned to France to
congratulate Charles IX on his marriage afterwhich he did return to England
bringing Paul du Foix along to continue the discussion of the impending
marriage. Also within that year he had been bestowed a Master of Arts from
Cambridge. In 1572, he became a member of her Majesty's Privy Council and became
employed as Commissioner at state trials.